Friday, 7 August 2009

The kool aid's so bright I gotta wear shades

However, before we start, you may wish to turn down the colour settings on your computer. Lets just say that Subtlety, your name is not Kool Aid...

As you may have guessed, I have been hand dying yarn, using nothing other than Kool Aid (which I ordered off the interwebs), a glass bowl and a microwave. Instructions for this are available on Knitty.com.

The resulting colours are, ahem, zingy. Ideal if you want to knit for Oompa Loompas and just can't get that psychedelic hit from your LYS.

So are you ready?

Ok... here we go...

I have to confess I did not keep a perfect track of what I used... but it was more or less as follows:

Skein 1 dyed using 1 part Lemon & Lime to 2 parts Berry Blue

Skein 2 dyed using 2 parts Lemon & Lime

Skein 3 dyed using 2 parts Orange

Skein 4 dyed using 3 parts Cherry

Skein 5 dyed twice (the first batch using 1 part Grape to 2 parts Cherry - then overdyed using a crazy mixture of cherry, black cherry tropical punch and grape)

Things I learned about Dying...

The first skein I dyed was the Lemon & Lime and it took me several seconds to dip the second half of the skein into the dye ...this has resulted in a variegated finish - where half of the skein is a brighter green than the other half. So if you prefer a regular coverage, I think it is better to try and dip the whole skein in at once.

After its first dying, I noticed that the deep red skein had a few irregular patches where the dye had not taken, and it did not look good. So I overdyed the skein, this time using loads of koolaid. The interesting bit its that it didn't really take up that much dye the second time around. I think there may be a limit to how much dye a single skein can realistically absorb. The already dyed parts went a slighty deeper red, while the irregular patches took up a full soaking of dye to blend in with the rest.

All of the above skeins are superwash sock yarn, and the microwave method worked beautifully. So much so that I got a little carried away and progressed immediately to two skeins of lace weight Merino/silk. I am not sure these skeins reacted very well to the microwave (will blog the results of that later).